“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

I’ll bet we’ve all transcribed an old document and played the jump-back-and-forth game between the image that we were transcribing and the program we were using to transcribe the document, such as Wordpad or OpenOffice.org Writer. Maybe you’ve even tiled the 2 windows on your machine, which will work but still leaves a lot to be desired. The solution?

I happened across a really neat program this morning called Transcript 2.3:

“Transcript came into being because of my dissatisfaction with using a seperate editor and picture viewer when transcribing digital images of old documents. I always had to switch between the editor and my image viewer when I needed to move the image so the next part would be visible.

I thought that it should be easier when this could be done from within one program. I couldn’t find a program that did this though, so I decided that I would try to write such a program myself, and here is the result.”

The basic version is a freeware program and is perfect for my needs. Here is a screenshot of a contract between my 3rd great-grandfather Dr N B Kennedy and the Confederate States Army from 1862, as seen in Transcript 2.3:

No more bouncing back and forth between text editor and document image!